But wait! Christians aren’t the only ones obsessed with the dating scene. If you search “rules for dating,” you may notice the unchurched are just as guideline-happy as the rest of us. It seems that dating might be universally confusing. So what’s the difference with Christians?

What makes Christian dating so hopelessly complicated is the Christians themselves. We bring our love for out-of-context scripture and applied-only-when-convenient principles into the mix, making for an entirely unique brand of utter ridiculousness.

Who killed Jesus? Was it God the Father? Did God send himself to kill himself in order to appease himself?

As we discussed previously, the penal substitution model of atonement is built on a retributive idea of justice. It casts God as the vindictive herald of retribution and validates a pagan understanding of the gods and their constant need for sacrifice.

The key to understanding atonement is to understand the God revealed in Jesus. In the ministry and teaching of Jesus – in his solidarity and non-condemning posture towards humanity, his ability to freely forgive, and his view of sin as a sickness that needed to be healed – we do not find the kind of God who demands retribution and blood in order to forgive. If you think about it, that’s actually not forgiveness at all. A penal understanding of justice is a human construct and the lowest form of justice. The justice of Heaven is restoration. It looks like healing for the broken rather than the eye-for-an-eye model Christ rejected.[Read more…]

One mark of great intelligence is that a person can solve a number of problems with a single stroke. I believe this is why Paul spoke of the ‘rich variety’ of God’s secret and hidden wisdom in having his Son become incarnate and die on Calvary (Eph 3:10; 1 Cor 1:30, 2:7). Through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the infinitely wise God solved a number of problems. Among other things, through Christ God defeated the devil and his cohorts (Heb 2:14; 1 Jn 3:8); revealed the definitive truth about himself (Rom 5:8; Jn 14:7-10); reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20-22); forgave us our sins (Acts 13:38; Eph 1:7); healed us from our sin-diseased nature (1Pet 2:24); poured his Spirit on us and empowered us to live in relation to himself (Rom 8:2-16); and gave us an example to follow (Eph 5:1-2; 1 Pet 2:21). God’s wisdom is displayed in a ‘rich variety’ indeed! – Gregory Boyd, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views

We’ve covered quite a bit so far in our discussion on Hell. We looked at every time the word “Hell” is mentioned in scripture (and discovered it basically isn’t… ever) and then we looked at every passage seeming to suggest eternal torment (and found how poorly we understand stuff that wasn’t written to us).

But get excited, because like Jesus distributing wine at a wedding, we’ve saved the best for last.

While our past work has established that the concept of Hell can’t be adequately sourced from the Bible, today, we’ll be looking at Church history to see how Hell lodged itself into Christian beliefs. We’ll show you where on the timeline eternal torment became a thing people believed in, we’ll look at the decidedly non-Biblical sources where it originated, and we’ll even examine why it stuck around.

Since the beginnings of Christian theology, people have recognized the tension between some of the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament versus the revelation of God in Christ.

We like to pretend that these views are not contradictory. We’ve created a dance of fancy theological footwork to merge the image of violence with the image of peace. We try to say it’s not “contradiction”, and use words like “paradox” and “mystery” instead. We say things like “God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

All the while, we know it doesn’t add up. The reality is that we see two opposing portraits of God in the scriptures: a violent God of wrath slaughtering his enemies and commanding his people to do the same, and Jesus… saying his Father is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, saying he loves his enemies and commanding us to do the same.

While I can’t claim to perfectly resolve this dilemma, my goal today is to provide a compelling case for why Jesus is, as Paul describes, “the image of the invisible God,” and THE standard by which all other images of God must be held accountable.

No matter where you look, you can’t convincingly defend the idea of eternal torment through Scripture.

Last week, we looked at every single time the Bible mentions “Hell”, and we discovered that, in essence, it doesn’t. While there are 4 words that are sometimes translated as “Hell”, none of them actually mean anything resembling our modern concept of Hell.

BUT… as many of our intelligent readers were quick to point out, showing the word “Hell” is missing from the Bible does not conclusively prove the concept of Hell is not present in the Bible.

So that’s what we’ll be looking at today – the other parts – the Biblical passages that seem to suggest eternal torment without using the word “Hell”. We’ll cover:

Weeping, Gnashing of Teeth & Outer Darkness

The Parable of the Sheep & The Goats

The Parable of Lazarus & The Rich Man (featuring Brad Jersak)

Revelation & The Lake of Fire

Paul’s “Everlasting Destruction” In 2 Thessalonians

Plus, we’ll take a look at a key word in John 3:16 that is mistranslated!

Much of the Bible is debatable. Much of the Bible is open to numerous interpretations. There are many theological stances that can be convincingly argued both for AND against.

The modern concept of Hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is not one of them. Today, we are going to look at every mention of “Hell” in the Bible, and we are going to demonstrate this conceptual staple of Western Christianity to be virtually untenable.